The Intern

Shortly after midnight last Saturday I received a surprising email. It came from a young woman soon to head off to an upper-crust liberal arts college in the midwest spending the summer at her grandparents'  in Buenos Aires who had seen my byline and wanted to know whether she could be my summer intern! I hesitated but secretly rejoiced. Although I had a summer intern last year -- a chain-smoking half Puerto Rican graduate student from New York City with severe ADHD who became known, among Monrovia's expats, for her talent with a hula hoop -- last week represented the first time someone had written to me and volunteered to do whatever I thought fit. At last, I thought, I am no longer on the first rung of the ladder! I have advanced and it's visible to all! Then I came back down to Earth and wrote to the young woman, as politely and clearly as possible, to dissuade her of any notions of grandeur. I am only a freelancer, I explained, no major newspaper correspondent. I work from my dining room table, not from a noisy foreign bureau, and while I have had the privilege to have some work printed in some of the world's top publications, I am still very close to the bottom of the ladder, particularly from the vantage point of the actual correspondents a decade or so older than me who've been climbing all the while.